Partners to build future Industry 4.0 solutions
Microsoft Corp. and the BMW Group announced a new community initiative to enable faster, more cost-effective innovation in the manufacturing sector. In manufacturing, production and profitability can be hindered by complex, proprietary systems that create data silos and slow productivity.
The Open Manufacturing Platform is designed to break down these barriers through the creation of an open technology framework and cross-industry community. The initiative is expected to support the development of smart factory solutions that will be shared by OMP participants across the automotive and broader manufacturing sectors. The goal is to significantly accelerate future industrial IoT developments, shorten time to value and drive production efficiencies while addressing common industrial challenges.
IoT developments
Built on the Microsoft Azure industrial IoT cloud platform, the OMP is intended to provide community members with reference architecture with open source components based on open industrial standards and an open data model. In addition to facilitating collaboration, this platform approach is designed to unlock and standardize data models that enable analytics and machine learning scenarios data that has traditionally been managed in proprietary systems. Utilizing industrial use cases and sample code, community members and other partners will have the capability to develop their own services and solutions while maintaining control over their data.
Oliver Zipse, a member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Production stated, “Mastering the complex task of producing individualized premium products requires innovative IT and software solutions. The interconnection of production sites and systems as well as the secure integration of partners and suppliers is particularly important. We have been relying on the cloud since 2016 and are consistently developing new approaches. With the Open Manufacturing Platform as the next step, we want to make our solutions available to other companies and jointly leverage potential in order to secure our strong position in the market in the long term.”
